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We all remember Squid Game. It dropped more than two years ago and quickly became a real global sensation as the most watched series on Netflix, inspiring many many social media memes and some low-hanging fruits for cosplayers. The premise of the show was simple: There is a secret game with more than 400 contenders, all desperate and all in debt. The winner takes the large cash prize; everyone else dies. The rounds of the game consist of versions of widely known children’s games.
Given the extreme global popularity of the show, there was very little doubt that more Squid Game content was coming. And this fall, we got Squid Game: The Challenge. It is not a sequel, and it is not Season Two (that’s also in the works). It is a reality show, which recreates the original visual world and the original games. But the contenders are real people. Those who are eliminated don’t die, but the winner will take more than $4 million.
Two years ago, I argued on this page that the source of the extreme global popularity of the original show was psychological. There have been many films and TV shows about social inequality and on the face of it, it’s difficult to see why of all of these, Squid Game is the one that blew up. I argued that the reason was that Squid Game deliberately encourages the viewer to have a twofold attitude to the plot.
First, we identify with the characters, we feel for them when they fail, and we are jubilant when they succeed. But this is not all. We also identify with the VIPs who are introduced after the first couple of episodes: the super-rich spectators who bet money on the contestants, much like one does at a horse race. We, on our couch in our living room, watching these people compete, are, in some ways, in a very similar position to these VIPs: We're observers of cruelty. The fact that the show constantly reminds us of our observer status is a real novelty of the show and helps us to distance ourselves a bit from the fate of the competitors.
And this distancing effect is further strengthened by the fact that Squid Game is a Korean TV show. The characters speak Korean, and the show is about Korean society. This makes it easier for viewers elsewhere to distance themselves from what is going on in the game. The geographical distance introduces a bit of psychological distance, which makes the series a little less close to the bone for non-Korean viewers; that is, the vast majority of viewers.
Both of these psychological factors, however, are missing in the case of the reality-show version of Squid Game. First of all, the contenders are English-speaking, with similar problems and challenges as most viewers. Any one of them could be your neighbor. They could even be you. No psychological distance here. And there is no detachment from identifying with the characters either (as was induced by the VIP’s perspective in the original). We all get wrapped up with the real-life stories of these real-life people, just like we do when we watch any other reality show.
This takes away the subtlety of the original show, but it also takes away the real reason for its popularity – that it managed to deliver a fairly brutal criticism of social injustice while allowing viewers a certain degree of detachment – a feeling that it was not about them. Even if we bracket the ethically dubious aspects of Squid Game: The Challenge—it's for an amount of money that is really not a lot for a corporation like Netflix; 400-plus real people end up humiliating themselves, etc.—it’s a missed opportunity.
